Mr. Murison’s admirable student’s edition of some of the writings of Burke gives us examples of Burke not only during the American but during the French period. He has called his book, indeed, not after the _Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol_ or the _Speech at Bristol_, but after the _Letter to a Noble Lord_, in which Burke defends himself in the French period against the Duke of Bedford. Here, as during the American War, we find him protesting against the introduction of “metaphysical” disputes about rights into politics. During the American War he had said, in regard to the question of rights: “I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions. I hate the very sound of them.” Now, during the Revolution, he declared: “Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of man.” Unfortunately, Burke himself was something of a “metaphysician” in his attack on the French Revolution. He wrote against France from prejudice and from theory, and his eye is continually distracted from the facts of human nature to a paper political orthodoxy. Even here, however, he did not forget human nature, and, in so far as the French Revolution was false to human nature--if the phrase is permissible--Burke has told the truth in lasting prose. His greatness as an artist is shown by the fact that he can move us to silent admiration even when we disagree with him. There is plenty of dull matter in most of his writings, since much of them is necessarily occupied with the detail of dead controversies, but there is a tide of eloquence that continually returns into his sentences and carries us off our feet. We never get to love him as a man. We do not know him personally as we know Johnson. He is a voice, a figure, not one of ourselves. His eloquence is the eloquence of wisdom, seldom of personal intimacy. He is not a master of tears and laughter, but, like Milton, seems rather to represent a sort of impassioned dignity of human nature. But what an imagination he poured into the public affairs of his time--an imagination to which his time was all but indifferent until he used his eloquence in support of (in Lord Morley’s phrase) “the great army of the indolent good, the people who lead excellent lives and never use their reason.” Even then, however, the imagination survived, and, hackneyed though it is by quotation, one never grows weary of coming on that great passage in which he mourns over the fate of Marie Antoinette and the passing of the age of chivalry from Europe.